September 2016 Reading

Starting new thread.

Still dicking around on The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions (the good news: only two stories left!).

Dusty's September TBR

Isaac Asimov - The Currents of Space ✔
Gene Wolfe - Sword of the Lictor
Connie Willis - Doomsday Book ✔
H Beam Piper - Fuzzy Sapiens ✔
Ken Greenwood - Replay ✔
Andre Norton - Quest Crosstime
Frank Herbert - ''The Tactful Saboteur'' ✔
Piers Anthony - Cluster
Poul Anderson - Vault of the Ages ✔
Scott Westerfeld - Leviathan ✔

other genres
Enid Bagnold - National Velvet ✔
Ellery Queen - The American Gun Mystery ✔
Jacqueline Winspear - An Incomplete Revenge ✔
Xiaolong Qiu - A Loyal Character Dancer ✔
Edith Wharton - Xingu ✔
Nora Roberts - The Blue Dahlia ✔

I've started Pines, the first in Blake Crouch's Wayward Pines trilogy. I'm not sure it's sci-fi, but his Dark Matter, which I enjoyed, was.

Current reading Never at Home, a collection by a much under-appreciated sf writer (and publisher).

Read the debut appearance of saboteur extraordinaire Jorj McKie,in Frank Herbert's short story,The Tactful Saboteur. McKie at his trickiest.
I am now reading Connie Willis's Doomsday Book and Asimov's The Currents of Space

Just started The Big Book of Science Fiction, which is, true to form, BIG. It's a huge anthology of SF short stories that start with H.G. Wells and end at the present period.

Touchstones acting strange again.

>6 dustydigger: The only McKie story I've read (so far) is The Dosadi Experiment, when it was serialized in Analog (think that was the magazine) back in the '70s. Always meant to revisit that character/universe.

For the WWE Women of Genre Fiction challenge, I am currently reading The Cold Between by Elizabeth Bonesteel. I almost gave up at the start...

After a weird little prologue that had some questionable timeline issues, (may be explained later so am holding judgment for now)...

Chapter 1: All about a female soldier on furlough, feeling uncomfortable hanging out with her ship-mates in a planet-side bar and then being picked up by a guy who, it turns out, is a retired space pirate, (eye-roll from this reader).

Chapter 2: Is the space pirate's viewpoint of chapter 1 extended to them going to his place to make with the sexy sexy. Ugh...

I decided to give it one more chapter before throwing in the towel on what appeared to be a sex-heavy romance in space and... I'm glad I kept going. The book took a sudden turn and became a murder-mystery with a rapidly evolving plot-line that hearkens back to the prologue. Am now about 1/3 of the way through and am glad I didn't quit at the start, (it was a near thing).

Starting the month off with Stranger From a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein. It is about time I read it.

>9 ScoLgo: It sounds awful! Where can I find a copy?

>6 dustydigger: I enjoyed 'Doomsday Book', though it wasn't without faults (but I was able to dismiss those). Sadly, Willis' subsequent novels about time-travelling academics - which ought to be a wonderful premise - seemed to me to drop what was good in 'Doomsday Book' and focus in detail on what was less so.

Robert,is it only me or does 2054 Oxford seem instead very much like 1954?Particularly a 1954 hospital? :0) I swear if Dunworthy looked out of the window he would probably see Tolkien and C S Lewis talking about LOTR and Narnia on their way to an Inklings meeting!. I am only 100 pages in,so maybe the reason for this shadowing of the 1950s becomes clear,but its distracting me somewhat from the story. Also distracting is Willis's insistence of giving intricate details of every action or event. Sadly historical fiction is one of my least fave genres anyway,I look upon all the historical detail as a sometimes tiresome detour from the story or characters,slowing down the pace. Yep,true I am a weirdo.
At least so far I am relieved that most of Doomsday is set in 2054/1954(?) as they try to deal with the virus situation and seek a way to return Kivrin.And the style is smooth and readable so I am making progress.I had dreaded having almost 600 pages about the Black Death! lol.
I did read her To Say Nothing of the Dog and found similar faults of too much detail. All those time visits to the cathedral were boring and overly complex to me .
Oh well as I said it is a fair read,so I'll survive. And it will make it 49/65 Hugos and 33/52 Nebulas completed. Progressing,if slowly.

I don't remember much of the details about that novel, except that 2054 Oxford is badly in need of cellphone service.

>13 dustydigger: You're not far off in that view of the hospital as being stuck in 1954, dusty. I put it down to the fact that Willis' view of Britain was probably mainly gained in the late 1950s and 1960s when she worked as continuity in the film industry. Although, as Cecrow pointed out, the absence of mobile phones gets a bit obvious, I found that actually didn't matter too much as the mobile network has an irritating habit of breaking down or just not delivering at times when it's needed most, so that didn't actually ring false to me even though I kept mentally tripping over the telephone problems.

I forgave 'Doomsday Book' its faults for the medieval segments. I was not so kind with 'To say nothing...' as I found it riddled with inaccuracies (starting with Coventry and Birmingham being 60 miles apart instead of the 16 in real life) and appalling Americanisms put into the mouths of Victorians. The only part of that I actually took to were the bits in Coventry cathedral, but then again I used to live in the Coventry area and that felt quite real to me.

Of Blackout and All Clear I shall say nothing. You wouldn't want me to get started.

I loved reading Wool last month and I don't believe I fall into any of the stereotypes described in the August thread (i.e., I read 35 books a year on average and I read a decent amount of sci-fi). It was highly recommended to me by a mechanical engineer colleague and I'm a chemical engineer - I didn't get the 'un-science' comments.

I'm looking forward to reading Shift - Omnibus Edition: 2 this month.

Sorry for the defensive tone, but perhaps we could limit our critiques to the books themselves and not to the readers.

>16 LisaMorr: I have been reading (primarily) science fiction for about 50 years now and have to say that I too rather enjoyed the Wool omnibus. Is it perfect? No. Did I find it entertaining? Yes. Does it fall into the upper echelon of SF-nal works? Probably not. Is it somewhat derivative of the genre? Probably, yes. Is it internally logical? Not really. Was the writing 'clunky'? Not overly so. Did I find the characterization and storyline compelling? Yes, yes I did. If someone else did not, then that's fine too. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. As am I.

I guess I just go by the old saw; "I may not know what's 'good', but I know what I like."

>11 EnsignRamsey: So far, it's sort of settling into mediocrity. At just past the halfway point, Bonesteel has thankfully not returned to any more sex scenes* but, while the action and plot are both pretty good, a fair amount of the dialog is rather awkward.

I borrowed an e-copy from my library's Overdrive program. The book isn't completely terrible but I'm glad I didn't buy a copy.

* I have nothing against sex scenes per se, but they seem damnably difficult to write as I have rarely come across them in books where they don't bring the narrative to a screeching halt while tongues entwine and nipples perk up.

Finished Strange Relations, which was often interesting but not always pleasant. Next up I'll be relaxing with Derai by E.C. Tubb.

>4 jnwelch: I'd say Pines qualifies as SF but it reads more like a thriller. Dark Matter I think is more well rounded and a really good read.

I'm going to try and get a couple of reads in this weekend. Department of Temporal Investigations: Time Lock by Christopher L. Bennett and Murder in the Generative Kitchen by Meg Pontecorvo.

>16 LisaMorr: >17 ScoLgo: re Wool - fair points. As you say, it's reasonably enjoyable in its way, just not as great as its star rating might imply. The kind of things I kept tripping up on are the upper levels being kept cool with air pumped up from the deep ones (which would be hotter even if they weren't full of heavy machinery), and as one reviewer put it, a future where engineers haven't heard of a block and tackle (and other spoilery things). But then I'll be the first to admit I'm a picky bugger.

>21 mart1n: This may be some sort of heresy, but surely a good book would be one that you couldn't pick holes in? And a book that has so many things in it that don't make sense or are just plain wrong*, well, that would be a bad book.

* Assuming, of course, that they're not deliberately so on the author's part.

>22 iansales: Well yes, but also (speaking as a former professional hole-picker) very rare... A good book successfully distracts you with gripping action etc and/or hand - waving. A great book (that deserves that proportion of 5 star ratings) doesn't have them in the first place!

Still reading The Vagrant but about to finish. Also busy at Dragon*Con in Atlanta and hope to meet Shinji Aramaki today...

>19 EnsignRamsey:

Finished Strange Relations, which was often interesting but not always pleasant.

Pretty much my assessment of it, particularly regarding the first story ("Mother"), which was disturbing as hell. I think most of those stories have aged extremely well, too - they certainly didn't read like they were written over half a century ago.

>22 iansales:

This may be some sort of heresy, but surely a good book would be one that you couldn't pick holes in?

I think perhaps the greatest sin that a fiction writer can commit is to put something in the work that takes you out of the story - that, instead of drawing you in, makes you go, "Hey! I'm reading a book!". This is, of course, highly subjective - something that drives, say, a physics professor to distraction might be completely unnoticed by me, and vice versa.

>25 artturnerjr:

"I think perhaps the greatest sin that a fiction writer can commit is to put something in the work that takes you out of the story - that, instead of drawing you in, makes you go, "Hey! I'm reading a book!". This is, of course, highly subjective - something that drives, say, a physics professor to distraction might be completely unnoticed by me, and vice versa."

I think that there are very few categorical imperatives, although that may be one of them. And still, even that is subjective.

Personally, I am much more interested in what someone's criteria are, rather than whether they label something "good" or "bad." I listen only if you tell me your criteria, and then articulate the reasons that a particular book meets those criteria. Otherwise it is just a matter of taste, isn't it?

>25 artturnerjr: Getting something that requires experise in a subject on the part of a reader is forgivable, although a good writer should treat every reader as if they were expert in everything. But plot holes, inconsistencies, lack of rigour... those are writing craft. And good authors do not get their craft wrong.

As for things that drag you out of the story - well, that could be deliberate. I broke the fourth wall deliberately in All That Outer Space Allows. Novels don't have to be immersive - that's a relatively new thing in fiction writing anyway, just look at the structure of Frankenstein, for example.

>25 artturnerjr: Yes, Farmer is an interesting author when he gives full reign to his sexual or religious preoccupations, even if the results are a bit icky sometimes. Sigmund Freud would have been delighted by the Oedipal concerns of "Mother". In fairness he (Farmer) dared to address themes in SF that no one had at the time, and hardly anyone since.

Reading Hammerfall. Trying to catch up on some older sci fi.

>22 iansales: >25 artturnerjr: >26 vwinsloe:

To me and this is a personal bias I suppose, a good Sci Fi book often starts with a ridiculous premise by today's standards. Time travel could be an example, another could be colonization of a planet on a distant star. The story then is described logically thereafter.

I've just finished reading The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson and Solitaire by Kelley Eskridge.

>15 RobertDay: . I am being driven nuts by the way Willis hammers home points repeatedly,and is obsessively detailing everything. 45 lines to describe an old shed/stable/sleeping area for a minor character? (yep,I counted them because I just couldnt believe my eyes! lol). One sentence would be enough,since she only sat there to rest,and never anyone except for seeing a rat in a cage.. Looking for a person?Three pages looking around in detail at every place the person wasnt at does not appeal to me.
I keep getting distracted about the translator she has. After 20 pages showing that she couldnt understand or make herself understandable to the ''contemps'' she now just speaks modern English into it and somehow they hear mediaeval. Cant get my head around that at all.And when Kivrin talks about the people as ''contemps'' I keep doing a double take thinking she meant ''contemptables'' :0)
Back in 2054 Oxford,which looks and sounds like 1954,though described by someone who has been reading old 1930s Dorothy L Sayers Peter Wimsey stories,I am irritated at the repeated tale that ''The NHS phoned you''.Really?
When I can stop tearing my hair out and can overcome these irritations the story goes smoothly and quite engagingly,but I cant help but wish an editor had cut out 200 pages or so,it would be a much better book.255/587 pages read,still a long way to go.......sigh........
And if I am having problems with this one,I can see why you dont even want to talk about the WWII books. :0(

>27 iansales:

But plot holes, inconsistencies, lack of rigour... those are writing craft.

They also require redrafting, having knowledgeable and thorough readers look at your work before submitting it for publication and getting feedback from them, editing... all of which are usually time-consuming, labor-intensive, and kind of boring - too much so for some writers, I suspect. :)

As for things that drag you out of the story - well, that could be deliberate... Novels don't have to be immersive...

Oh yeah, absolutely. The most interesting prose novel I've read this year (probably not the best, but definitely the most interesting) was Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream. For the conceit of the novel (that it's a science fiction novel by an alternate history version of Adolf Hitler) to work, it has to be lousy - it has to constantly pull you out of the story, constantly make you say, "Ugh! This is awful!". It's a challenging and ballsy approach to fiction, and one that, I think, has a lot of fascinating things to say about SF in particular and popular entertainment in general, but it's a hell of a thing to read (and to review).

(There are, of course, many other examples of this sort of thing - any story with an unreliable narrator requires the reader to not merely become immersed in the story, but instead to constantly question the veracity of the story that's being told, in order to try to understand what's really going on - that one just popped into my head as an extreme example of this strategy.)

>32 dustydigger: Here's Adam Roberts's excellet review of Doomsday Book: https://sfmistressworks.wordpress.com/2012/06/05/doomsday-book-connie-willis/

>34 iansales: Wow Ian,considering he was doing the introduction to this book,thats a very forthright view of the work to say the least! lol.
I dont know much about the 14th century so many of the points passed me by, or didnt bother me much,but I did get annoyed by the style. Roberts is right though that it is an engaging read. I'll bear with it as I am going into the second half of the book,so what with the plague etc,maybe Kivrin will be too busy to obsess about the drop spot so much. More action,less fruitless wandering and wondering!

>20 tottman: Agreed. I'm about 3/4 of the way through the third book in the Wayward Pines trilogy. Among other things, I'm noticing some plot holes that I didn't see in his Dark Matters, but the WP books still are page-turners.

>35 dustydigger: I suppose that as I know rather more about the 19th and 20th centuries, I didn't spot the anachronisms in 'Doomsday Book' whilst the ones in the later novels stood up and bit me on the nose.

As for Kivrin's translator, I understood that it was wetware that enabled her (supposedly) to understand Medieval English and (in a more hand-wavingly way) form Modern English sentences in her head and speak them as Medieval English. I also assumed that it had the ability to learn, which is why she (slowly) comes to understand and be able to speak Medieval English - though it is written as Modern English because that's the language Connie Willis writes in. I had no problem with that; and indeed, I felt that the device of having the wetware not be as good as Oxford said it would be was quite likely. I remember the first time I stayed in the former East Germany; having travelled quite a bit in Austria, I blithely asked for a menu in German, only to find it totally incomprehensible because Austrian German and Saxon German are two very different things when you come to actually use them - and those are modern, living dialects, existing contemporaneously just a few hundred kilometres apart. It took a few days, but I soon made the adjustment; so Kivrin's experience held true to me.

If you're a real glutton for punishment, I did write reviews for LT on 'Doomsday Book', 'To say nothing...' and 'Blackout/All Clear'. I'm in pretty broad agreement with Adam Roberts on 'Doomsday Book', and I doubt he would have had anything much good to say about the others, assuming he reviewed them.

I finished Department of Temporal Investigations: Time Lock which was ok, but a little disappointing, even at novella length. I expected a little more. I think it needed to either be lengthened a little to do the characters and the plot elements justice, or some of the characters and plot points needed to be dropped to make the rest hang together a little better.

Now alternating between Wolf Road and Murder in the Generative Kitchen.

I should probably have mentioned that Derai was a re-read. Anyway I'm done with that now and I have nothing to read, because a book that I ordered has failed to arrive.

>37 RobertDay: what Kivrin needed was a babel fish! I did have fun trying to decipher some of the sentences that Kivrin couldnt understand when she first came round at the manor. Willis is having a bit of fun at times by reproducing the sounds as heard, ''shay'' for she,or she divides the words up in the wrong places. But of course that is what an unfamiliar accent or language is like.I have always been hopeless with foreign languages simply because I am useless at hearing individual units!It all sounds like gibberish,apart from maybe one in six words being intelligible :0) And I am hopeless at accents. Look how near I am to Scotland,in nearby County Durham,and I used to have to put on the subtitles to understand Rab C Nesbitt! Mind you Robert,I bet even some scots had to listen very carefully so as to understand him. lol.
Written language gives very little real help with dialect pronunciation. I wonder how on earth Mr Latimer had taught her to speak middle English? All good fun though.

The answer to your question, "How on earth (did) Mr Latimer (teach) her to speak middle English?" is probably "the way it's taught in universities now".

That's to say, language experts would have arrived at an "accepted" pronunciation of ME based on its similarities to other languages and dialects, specifically Old Norse and some of the dialects of German such as Friesian and probably Icelandic, which uses some of the letters found in OE. But this is always going to be educated guesswork.

That doesn't stop people trying and using OE and ME, especially in reconstructions; there are enough Anglo-Saxon reconstructionists around to make this more than just an academic exercise. I learnt most of what I know about OE pronunciation from drinking sessions at sf conventions with well-known 1990s sf fan Professor Tom Shippey, then of York University...

And of course, a babel fish would very definitely come into the category of wetware!

>42 RobertDay: Yep.but at least the babel fish was instantaneous,not dragging behind like poor Kivrin's.
As for the uni method of guessing the pronunciation,dont you love the thought of all those academics arguing with each other,each proposing their own made up idea of something no one can prove. The perfect academic arena!
And I'm sure Tom Shippey was extremely persuasive with his particular version.What did you drink back then and there? Here Newcastle Brown Ale is the approved beverage for stimulating brain cells to promote academic clarity.

>40 dustydigger: >41 RobertDay: I once did a performance of Frank McGuinness' play Someone Who'll Watch Over Me in which I had to recite part of an Anglo-Saxon poem called The Wanderer. I found a recording online and memorized it using a vaguely Scandinavian accent. It's quite a beautiful poem both in the original and in translation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s9fh3cmWt8

Middle English is much easier, I always find a vaguely West country accent seems to fit the words best.

I love Middle English. When I was an aspiring Medievalist, I studied a fair amount of Middle English verse, such as Pearl. I had to read it aloud to really "get" it, and had a great time doing so.

>43 dustydigger: I was three years a student on Tyneside, and even now - 38 years later - I still refer to the place as 'Newcassel'. So the effects of 'the Broon' are well-known to me!

As to what I've drunk in convention bars over the years..... let's not go there.

Going to start my second Chanur novel Chanur's Venture

Yep,Pearl was quite difficult,but other stuff like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales were easier. I really like all those little poems such as Twa Corbies ,the carols like I Sing of a Maiden that is Makeless,plus Lyke Wake Dirge,Lament of the Makers,and near the end of the period,the Border Ballads - plus Malory of course! Also,early modern stuff like Skelton etc.There's such a freshness and directness of emotion which really appeal to me.

>47 Lynxear: The Chanur books are such fun,with all those distinctive aliens. As so often with Cherryh,humans are rather second class people,not masters of the universe as humans usually are! lol.Poor old Tully.
Pyanfar Chanur is a great character.Enjoy!

I finished Murder in the Generative Kitchen by Meg Pontecorvo and really liked it. It's a novella but my only complaint is that it ended rather abruptly. It's really a future courtroom mystery set in the future with a lot of SF concepts both in the facts of the case as well as the structure of the justice system. I'd really recommend this one. Lot of interesting stuff going on with this story.

>28 EnsignRamsey:

I really wish Farmer was more widely read these days. I think there are so many more people now that would be responsive to his aesthetic than there were when he was starting out. He was a true pioneer of the genre.

>49 dustydigger: Yes I plan on enjoying this book. I read the first in this series The Pride of Chanur and also Merchanter's Luck and Forty Thousand in Gehenna which were combined into an omnibus Alliance Space... I liked "Merchanter's Luck" but not "Forty Thousand in Gehenna".

C J Cherryh is becoming my favourite Sci Fi author lately.

Started The Fifth Season.

Started The Adversary. Took me an age just to finish the synopsis.

Done with The Big Book of Jack the Ripper which had several fantastic fiction pieces I didn't cover in my review, and now I'm on to Peter F. Hamilton's A Night Without Stars.

Just finished rereading Eon (B+) for my book group. My overall opinion is that while the book hasn't aged that badly, the things that I found clunky back in the day I'm a little less willing to let slide.

>56 Shrike58: It had a fabulous premise,the ultimate in big dumb objects,this endless time tunnel,but I just felt it was a bit dull with mundane characters and didnt have the wow factor at all,and didnt make enough of the idea of the endless tunnel,and focused on a time only 1200 years down the line.Still fixated on the Cold War too,which I rarely find engrossing! :0)

I skimmed 'Eon' the first time I read it, mainly because the US paperback edition I had had a mammoth great stonking big SPOILER in the blurb, so I read it waiting for the plot turn and everything else was secondary. Also, I'd not long read Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama at the time, and there are distinct similarities between the two, at least at the outset. I re-read it and the other two novels in the sequence recently and enjoyed it much more. True, some of the characters were a little identikit, but others came over as - well, reasonably well-drawn.

(I know that is a bit of damning with faint praise, but I did enjoy 'Eon' more in my recent re-read.)

Put aside Doomsday Book for a little while,to get away from the overdetail :0)
Instead I read Edith Wharton's short story,Xingu about a little book club of five would be upper crust ladies who meet regularly to discuss the latest literary and cultural triumph,without a single original thought in their snobbish heads.They are jubilant about having snagged a literary lion as a guest for their next meeting,plus a new member for the group,who appals them by saying she is reading Trollope for pleasure,when they know Trollope is so very outdated,my dear,and cheerfully admits she dropped the latest book of the literary lion lady in a river and hasnt read it.
The literary lion appears, is cold,, disdainful and asks them piercing questions they havent a clue about answering. It seems the new member is saving them from embarrassment when she tells the guest that the group has been heavily involved all year with Xingu,and the group happily fall into their usual vague platitudes and would be insightful rubbish extolling Xingu,and when the guest abruptly goes off with the new member to play bridge, they finally check up and Xingu isnt a book or a philosophy,but an Amazon river! Cringes all round at the nonsense they have so confidently spouted.
I bet Wharton didnt get many calls to discuss literature in the rich folks salons after she published this. Spot on satire as Wharton gets out the knives for flaying the pretensions and prejudices of her own class. Brilliant amusing stuff. Read it for the ''X'' title in my A-Z Authors and titles challenges.
I also finished Edith Bagnold'sNational Velvet I'd say it wasnt written for kids at all,though sophisticated 12 year old readers may grasp some of its subtleties,and ,as kids do with difficult books, pick out the horsey bits - after all,thats what the film did! -this book is really about the dynamics of the Brown family,a person's aspirations to be the best at something,and also the crass intrusions of the media and how fleeting is fame. The post race section is a pretty sharp and scathing take on the media which,taking away a few dated expressions,could have been written yesterday. Wonderful characters,lyrical if quirky writing,humour and pathos all make for a poignant often moving read. LOVED it. A true classic.
Not much SF this week,I am immersed in a vintage Ellery Queen and some other crime reads for my 12x12 challenge.
Hope next week to start Ken Grimwood's Replay and Gene Wolfe's Sword of the Lictor if I ever get through the Willis marathon read.302/586 pages read,still a long way to go.....sigh.....

>58 RobertDay: When I read Rendezvous with Rama I really enjoyed it. None of the sequels came near it. Rama II was simply a re-run of the original book and the third and fourth were just a waste of time in my opinion. I reckoned II, III & IV were simply platforms to give Gentry Lee a leg up on the strength of Clarke's reputation.

After reading Rendezvous with Rama I was expecting a trilogy but it was a long time arriving and then turned out to be four books. That felt like a betrayal because, as stated at the end of Rendezvous, the Ramans do everything in threes.

I enjoyed Eon but at the end of it I felt, "so what". (By the way, Touchstones brought up "Artemis Fowl" for Eon.) I don't know why I loved RwR but felt so-so about Eon. I think I felt Eon was told in too clinical a fashion. I did not get the same sense of pioneering and discovery that I had when reading the Clarke novel.

>60 pgmcc:

That felt like a betrayal because, as stated at the end of Rendezvous, the Ramans do everything in threes.

Unless, of course, they can score a little extra cash by doing things in fours. :)

>61 artturnerjr: I just wonder if it was the Ramans that made the decision. ;)

I do agree that extra cash was the objective. Publishers are supposed to be commercial organizations so one cannot be surprised that they try to squeeze a cash cow dry. I am sure the Ramans, if involved in the decision making process at all, where most upset. Perhaps they were offered a three book deal on three other planets to compensate for the ignominy of a four book series on Earth.

>60 pgmcc: I had a serious shock when I read Rama II: I'd ignored it for ages and then saw a copy in a remainder bookshop for 50p and thought "Let's see just how bad this is". About a third of the way in, someone killed off a character who looked as though they were going to be quite major, and I was seriously upset! (Much to my surprise.) I stick with the following books (I suspect that Gentry Lee's agent pushed for a Clarke/Lee trilogy), and I had a similar reaction to the death of a character in the last book, so someone was doing something right.

On the other hand, my LT review of the middle book, Garden of Rama, was just four words - "Get on with it" - which some kind soul flagged as 'not a review' until I pointed out that I was trying to express my irritation with the middle book of a trilogy where nothing happens at very great length. The flag was removed. And the whole thing is a Shaggy God Story and there isn't actually any resolution.

A few years ago, someone gave me the two Gentry Lee solo additions to the sequence (Bright Messengers and Double Full Moon Night). One was bad, the other was dreadful. I added LT reviews, which you might find amusing.

>58 RobertDay: I hate it when spoilers are built into a book like that. My first experience with it was a young adult suspense novel, SF-ish, that I owned in the 60s, called The Spanish Cave. I liked it, but the whole book turned on a mystery which the book cover carefully illustrated.

>63 RobertDay: the middle book of a trilogy where nothing happens at very great length.

I love it. I think it pretty much captures my feelings about that book.

Your Bright Messenger review is very good.

"a British Catholic from Londonderry". I don't know if that's an attempt to show social attitudes changing, or just carelessness on the part of the author

Well spotted.

Obviously, the standard of scientific scepticism is due to decline over the next 175 years.

Unfortunately there appears to be an acceleration in this process if current political debates in some countries are anything to judge by.

Your Double Full Moon review is also very good. (Both review "thumbed-up" by the way.)

Your comments about sex and info-dumps reminded me of my experience when reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. After the first couple of coupling scenes I realized that when characters engaged in sexploits it was simply a preamble to and info-dump delivered while the characters are having their post-coital cigarettes. It got to the stage that when I read that two characters noticed one another and appeared to be having a opportunity to be alone, my reaction was, "Oh! Here comes and info-dump."

>64 rshart3:, my copy of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier depicted the final scene of the book. How smart was that? :P

For a sci-fi example, beware the cover of some editions of Captive Universe by Harry Harrison. Although in that case, it might help you swallow the story easier if you know in advance what's coming.

> 66 I've always been grateful that I picked up Captive Universe from the library, with a non-committal impressionist cover picture and a brief blurb about Aztecs. Finding out what on Earth was going on was a rare pleasure. Sadly I'll never be able to go back and read it for the first time again.

>52 Lynxear: Welcome to the club. Lots of C.J. Cherryh fans out there.

Finished Never at Home. Duchamp is a much underrated author.

I've started reading one of the collections of David Langford's reviews, The Complete Critical Assembly. The earliest ones date from 1983 and it's interesting to see what novels came out at the same time as others...

I finished Asimov's The Currents of Space. It was an OK read,typical Asimov,with the usual rather flat characters,but a reasonably interesting depiction of the relationship between two planets,one of which produces the only known plant kyrt which is processed into a beautiful material,the other rules and exploits the workers shockingly. Typical Asimov pessimism over human nature :0) It has the usual Asimov conspiracies and a slight mystery,complete with a Poirot like revealing of the culprit. Asmov must have been a Christie fan and enjoyed producing his own mystery series,The Black Widowers series. To me however the writing is so dry and clunky it detracts from the story sometimes.
You've got to love the boundless faith that some day humans will inhabit not hundreds,not thousands,but a million planets across the galaxy! :0)
Starting Ken Greenwood's Replay next,then hope to get to Sword of the Lictor,if I ever complete Doomsday Book I am almost at screaming point with the endless and pointless repitition. A much shorter,leaner and more impactful book is in there smothered by too much rambling. I know this book is amazingly popular and a multi award winner,so it may be just me! lol.

Finally finished The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions last night. Most of the stories were just okay, although there is a novella (The Mound) toward the end of the collection that was really quite fascinating; I thought it recalled the best work of Edgar Rice Burroughs in many ways.

Current reading: the unlikely trio of The King in Yellow, The Amazing Spider-Man Omnibus, Volume 1, and The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition.

>18 ScoLgo: you forgot about members throbbing.

Whew! At last I finished Connie Willis's Doomsday Book A fair read that could have been even better if there had been less repetition and the stressing of themes had been less heavyhandedly pointed.Willis never heard that less is more
Most of the historical inaccuracies were minor or passed me by completely so didnt bother me much,except the irritation of the times ''The NHS phoned you'' and the measurements being in centimetres. Written in late 80s I would have expected feet and inches would have been more sensible,both for US and UK audiences. Instead,every time I saw centimetres it brought back the French Revolution when centimetres and metres were invented,400 years after the plague!
But I did like the theme that human beings are human beings in all their variety, strengths and weaknesses,and historians are too fond of simplifying, even dismissing this for the ''big picture''.The same attitude that dismissively states that back in ye olden days when parents lost three or four of their children before they reached five years old they didnt feel it as much as we much more sensitive modern people do.OK,cultural mores and religion may have muted things in some ways but tragedy,grief and pain were still there to be suffered.
Now on to Sword of the Lictor and Grimwood's Replay

>3 dustydigger: I've read Asimov's Galactic Empire series a couple of times. Loved it! Currently reading Dark Matter and Dinosaurs, and listening to Jordan's Wheel of Time series on audiobook.

>75 Jim_Cronin: I enjoyed Pebble in the Sky,thought it the best of the trilogy,with its rather unheroic hero,who is walking down the street when he accidentally got hurtled into the future because of a nuclear accident in a nearby lab....... as you do.....! :0) Good fun!
The old authors didnt bother too much with creating plausible scenarios,just a quick excuse,then on to the story!Remember John Carter popping off to Mars from an apache burial place? :0) Bit weird when you think about it but we are so immersed in the story we couldnt care less!

>74 dustydigger:: Actually, CW using centimetres just shows up once more the American failure to engage with the metric system - or more particularly, the SI (Systeme Internationale) units of measurement, which set out which units out of the whole range of metric units should be used. In SI, the units of length in everyday usage are kilometres, metres and millimetres. No-one actually uses centimetres these days.

>77 RobertDay: "No-one actually uses centimetres these days."

Eh, the French do. Describing a lot of everday items as "0,xx meters" or "X meters and yyy millimeters" long or high would seem rather awkward.

>77 RobertDay: Librarians (well, cataloguers) use centimetres all the time. That's how we measure size of physical items in the catalogue record.

Also, as a Canadian, I use centimetres pretty often, too. Handy little guys :)

>77 RobertDay: >78 Jarandel: Canadians use centimeters in daily life but in science matters SI units have been in use for as long as I remember.

I stand corrected!

I shall have to go back and look at some of my technical texts from mainland Europe (mainly German, Austrian and Eastern European). But the usage I'm used to certainly is X.xx metres, even for quite small measurements.

I wonder if there is significance in the examples you quote being French and Canadian...

Here's a very common example of product specs on a smartphone in a Danish webshop.

http://www.elgiganten.dk/product/mobil-gps/mobiltelefoner/SONXPXABK/sony-xperia-...

HxWxD in centimeters. I'm sure I've seen millimeters used too, but never meters. Traffic signs are also km/h rather than m/s :-)

>53 jnwelch: snap - we appear to have another reading sync young man :)

>81 RobertDay: If you are talking to me... I am 3rd generation Canadian with an English heritage. I cannot speak for Quebec and parts of the Maritimes which are predominately French speaking but I would be surprised if they were different from the English side. Canada used the English system of measurement until the early 1970's when there was a push to become metric mainly because at the time it appeared that the USA was going metric to fall in line with Europe and I suppose the rest of the world.... the USA backed out of the conversion which was a pain in the assets as for tools you need both english and metric sizes in Canada.

In science disciplines SI units were taught in late High School and University since those units were the system of science. However there was a great deal of difficulty converting the general population over to metric. The usage today depends on the age of the person in Canada. Those born after 1970, by and large do not have difficulty using metric as that is all that is taught in school but older people had trouble adapting.

So you have the silly result of dual usage of both English and metric systems today. If you ask me my physical characteristics, I would still reply that I am 6' 3" and weigh about 240 lbs (not 75cm and and 109kg). Temperature outside is in celsius and wind speed is in Km/hr. I would now express distance more comfortably in Kilometers and speed of driving in Km/hr. BUT if you want to know how efficiently my car is using gasoline I am more comfortable with miles/gallon than liters/100km. Though that is changing slowly as our cars now are totally metric (with an inner ring for MPH on the speed dial)

Our meat and vegetables in the grocery stores are priced on tags in $/100grams and $/pound. But packaged goods are generally in metric or both systems if sold in the USA. Our Canadian football field is 110 yards long still and one must advance 10 yards before you get another first down. Lumber is still sold based on English dimensions... we buy 2"x4" studs that are 8ft long. or a 4'x8' sheet of plywood or sheeting. When building a wall frame you build the frame based on 16" centers.

so our day to day usage of metric/english units is a patchwork in Canada.... but as the older people disappear the trend is more and more to the use of metric.

But for science.... Always SI units in my experience and my University schooling and profession when I worked was as a Chemist or related to Chemistry (later in life I sold scientific instrumentation).

>84 Lynxear: I would still reply that I am 6' 3" and weigh about 240 lbs (not 75cm and and 109kg)

I can understand why you'd prefer to use Imperial if you shrink under metric :-)

>84 Lynxear: Oh dear,Lynxear,hope you are NOT 75 cm,thats only 2ft 6ins!Maybe 185cm?
We Brits have been totally resistant to the metric system.We stubbornly ask for llbs and ounces in shops instead of kilos and grammes. Its taken 20 years to get used to the Celsius scale for the weather. Very hot day,30 degrees? Still sounds very improbable to me,and my husband is forever asking what that number means,and then you hear me muttering ,30 divided by five makes six,multiply by nine,makes 54,add 32 makes 86. By then he has forgotten he asked! :0)

>84 Lynxear:, similar experience with me, also Canadian. I want to pick up a replacement-something at the hardware store, I measure it in inches AND centimeters because I don't know which one will be relevant at the store.

>86 dustydigger:

You must be older than me. I've never used Fahrenheit for temperatures (and I've been an adult for 30 years). The only thing I use pints for are beer, cider and milk. The only things pounds and ounces are used for are burgers and dope.

>84 Lynxear: et seq: well, it's true that people use a mix of weights and measures generally. I'm as guilty of that as anyone else.

My father was in sectional building construction, and (much to the surprise of people who've forgotten it) the UK building industry switched to metric in the late 1960s. So I grew up with a father who could do Imperial to metric conversions in his head, because that's what he was doing all day.

Of course, now we've had Brexit, there are people saying "We demand our pounds and ounces back!" I'm saying nothing.

I learnt a few rules of thumb for conversion that have always stood me in good stead:

1 lb. = 454 grams (learnt that from jam jar labels!)
"A metre measures 3 foot three, it's longer than a yard, you see" (my youngest niece taught me that when she was six or seven because that was what she was being taught at school. I was about 27 then; she's about 35 now!)

And although we buy fuel here by the litre, my car is still calibrated to calculate consumption in miles per gallon, too. (Well, of course, we actually buy it by value, not volume.)

The one where I'm really illogical - I admit it! - is temperature. When it's cold, I'm happy with Celsius. Zero or one or two degrees I can grasp and ikt seems right to me. But when it turns hot, I'm still happier with Fahrenheit. 30 degrees just doesn't sound hot to me, whereas 80 degrees (Fahrenheit) does! And I know from years of developing my own photographs and mixing developer solutions that 20 degrees Celsius equals 68 degrees Fahrenheit - so that's another equivalence I have at my fingertips.

>88 andyl: lol1 I'm 68,Andyl, and definitely an old dinosaur in many ways. I lived off in Africa all through the 70s,and came back to UK a bit disconnected from society,and in many ways never did catch up,so I tend to live in the past.My husband is in his late 70s,so neither of us tend to be on the cutting edge of modern life!:0)
I'm afraid I am one of those older folks Lynxear talked about,the oldies who have to die off before the new way can really be established..
Talk about dinosaurs I can remember farthings,and doing sums like ''Multiply £17 18s and eleven pence and three farthings by 17''. Took most of a lesson and most of a page doing one of those sums! lol.Quite a relief when my own kids only had pounds and pence to deal with,simple long multiplication.

>86 dustydigger: hahaha... I wrote this message at 3am and botched the math. Six feet tall = 6 x 12 x 2.54 = 182.88cm ... and ... 3 inches = 3 x 2.54 = 7.62 cm so I am really 190.5 cm tall.

As far as conversion from Celsius to Fahrenheit I often used an approximate formula of deg F = deg C x 2 + 32... so 30 deg C would be 30 x 2 +32 or about 92 deg F ... totally wrong of course but close enough when you have to explain the Celsius temperature to the average American tourist in town.

>85 iansales: well (using my better height of 190cm) I feel like I am Shreik at that height measure... on the other hand, 109kgs makes me feel anorexic, when I am obviously not. However when I do lose weight I feel I am losing it 2.2 times faster using pounds instead of kilograms

I've just started reading The Dosadi Experiment in response to praise upthread.

Farthings = quarter pennies, amazing! We no longer even have pennies (1 cent). Joys of inflation.

I'll get around to Asimov's Empire trilogy eventually, having already read what came before (Robots) and after (Foundation); makes sense to fill in the middle. Also helps that those three novels are classics from his heyday, not eighties fill-in-the-blanks when he was piecing everything together.

>76 dustydigger: Yeah, I especially love the old :I don't know how it works... I didn't build the darn thing." explanation of almost any black box device. At least it offered some reason to suspend disbelief to get into the scene.

I'm Canadian, and 58 years old. I am completely used to Celsius to the point that I can't do Fahrenheit anymore and have to use Google to convert. I go back and forth between metric and imperial measurements depending on the recipe I'm following, or project I'm working on and most of the measuring implements in the house are calibrated in both metric and imperial. I admit, I still do my height/weight in imperial, but I could (and should) switch. Honestly I'd prefer to go 100% metric, and if we'd done so 30 years ago even the "old fogies" would be used to it and it would be no big deal.

95> Yeah ... if you look at the conversion to metric in Canada it was initially phased in at the start of the 1970's and there was a lot of confusion, witching/complaining as to why we were making this change. It was supposed to be in sync with the global change to metric that was supposed to be coming. We resisted for a long time but when the USA said they would convert to metric, Canada decided to go ahead... after all the USA was our largest trading partner so it sort of made sense at the time.

The conversion was phased over many years, HOWEVER, the USA did not follow through with metric conversion....WTF! So many raised the issue that why was Canada doing this when the USA was not. The Conservative government in the 1980's cancelled the Metric Commission, that was in charge of phasing the conversion and this halted the wholesale change from Imperial to Metric measures. But what had been done was left done... we did not regress back to what things were in 1970. So we are left with the hodgepodge of metric/imperial units that we have today. However eventually as the older population dies out, I can see that metrification will eventually be complete as it is taught in schools.

93> yeah we no longer have the penny coin in Canada and some want to remove the nickel as well. As you know the penny has NOT disappeared from our commerce. you can eliminate it in the list price of goods but applying Provincial and Federal sales taxes cause the penny to reappear. If paying in cash, the final total is rounded up or down but if you pay by credit or debit you pay to the penny. Actually I am glad they got rid of the penny as coinage... they were a nuisance to deal with.

Started reading The Cloud Seeders by James Zerndt.

Here is a quick way I convert °C to °F & back in my head...

0C = 32F. From that baseline, every 5C (up or down) is equal to 9F so, with Celcius on the left side of the equals sign...

-20=-4
-15=5
-10=14
-5=23
0=32
5=41
10=50
15=59
20=68
etc...

My work also involves dimensions of things so I'm quick with the 0.03937 on a calculator (to convert from mm to inches). Of course, the beauty of metric is you simply drop the first zero after the decimal for centimeters (0.3937).

>73 nhlsecord: LOL!! So I did. <*-facepalm-*>

Finished The Just City and The Martian Race, halfway through The Sunborn.

At a certain point you start treating it all as alternate history...having not compared it page by page with a 1985 edition I think Bear was actually fairly astute to bet against Gorbachev at the time...so you could have your Cold War and eat it too. I agree that too many of the characters just weren't that interesting...apart from...possibly unintentionally...the Russian colonel! I also would like to know what happened to the Soviet political officers...talk about epistemological comeuppance.

>101 Shrike58: Well, as the Stone came back in time from an alternate timeline where the war didn't happen the same way, we can simply work on the assumption that the timeline the novel is set in isn't ours!

No, I felt the Russian colonel was quite an interesting character as well. As I recollect - I read 'Eon' perhaps a year or so ago - the Politruks were eliminated by autonomous defence systems.

Still reading Shadow and Claw by Gene Wolfe. Not a quick and easy read, that's for sure. And yet compelling.

It's a good thing I don't set reading goals as lofty as dustydigger. This book has pretty much killed my momentum. ;-)

>103 Thomas_Watson: lol! I am in the same boat,Thomas,as I am 30 pages into Sword of the Lictor and I am moving at a snail's pace. I am very wary of our Severian,who touts himself as the straightforward, eidetic-memoried, unbiased recounter of events.The character which seems so clearly depicted in Shadow seems to twist and change in each book,getting certainly less sympathy from me each time.Possibly all the furore about unreliable narrators and saying he is even lying isnt so much about his reporting of events,but about the revelation of traits of character that seem so different from that original view we had!Though perhaps we should think of the meal at Vodalus'camp(if you've got that far yet} as making for changes in Severian? At least thats my opinion.
Then all that strange vocabulary is headcracking too.And its so disconcerting the way a scene is so sharply described,yet the whole picture seems to be a rather misty kaleidoscope. Great stuff,brilliant writing by Wolfe,but I continually find that after being immersed in the story for ages,I come to the surface and find I've only completed 10 pages,and am bewildered. Great experience,but snail slow for me I'm afraid.
By comparison,I am moving much more quickly through Ken Grimwood's Replay,about a man who dies of a heart attack in his 40s and wakes up back in his 18 year old body and in Groundhog Day style repeatedly lives his life till once again dying on the same day .Good fun and I am also enjoying a crime story by Qiu Xiaolong,A Loyal Character Dancer. These balance out the intellectual effort expended on Severian's journeys a bit :0)

I just got past the feast of the shared memory bit. Severain (great name for a character who makes his living beheading people) changes quite a bit as you go past that, but I think it's as much about the reality of meeting his idol as anything.

Currently enjoying Nemesis Games, the 5th in the Expanse series by James S A Corey. I do love a good space-opera!

Finished Peter F. Hamilton's A Night Without Stars and on to his novella A Window Into Time.

Recently finished Storm Over Warlock. Fairly standard military/first-contact/adventure SF from Andre Norton. Good-guy protagonist = young, misunderstood but resilient single survivor of an alien invasion on a colony planet. Bad guys = cockroachy aliens that are in need of a good ol' fashioned Earth-style ass kicking - if only our young hero can overcome many seemingly unsurmountable odds to administer said ass-kicking. Added to the mix are another batch of indigenous and good, or at least ambivalent, aliens that may or may not end up helping our intrepid hero.

No real doubt as to the outcome here but the ride getting to the predictable ending was pretty fun.

Next up: Company Town. About three chapters in and really enjoying the cyberpunk sensibilities. Smart dialog. Colorful characters. Pretty great weird-world-building so far. We'll see where it goes...

>108 ScoLgo: Andre Norton always produced excellent YA science fiction,I've read several of her books,and they are always agreeable,if not setting the world on fire.
Interesting how many authors make the nasty aliens insect like,or else with slimy tentacles! Wonder why? :0)
I am about to start her Quest Crosstime,about alternate,parallel universes.
I have just finished the excellent Replay by Ken Grimwood,a World Fantasy award winner.When, Jeff, the 43 year old protagonist, dies suddenly from a heart attack, he then wakes up to find himself once more an 18 year old college boy,but with all his memories of his past life intact.Again he lives to the same date,again he dies - repeatedly returning to the original timeline.On a later ''replay'' he meets Pamela,another replayer and some of the sheer loneliness of keeping the situation secret is mitigated. But each replay becomes shorter,first by months,then by years,till in the end the replays only last minutes.Often sad,bittersweet and haunting,I was ever eager to see what the latest replay would be like. The characters come to the conclusion that they cant ever make the world better,only different,and that what we do to treat our people with kindness and love on a regular basis will impact on their very nature,.
OK perhaps a little schmaltzy and sentimental near the end,but a really enjoyable read.
Have put aside Sword of the Lictor for a while as I have challenge reads to finish this month,including H Beam Piper's Fuzzy Sapiens and three crime fiction reads.

Finished Nemesis Games by James S.A. Corey. Talk about changing the game. Wow. Best book yet in The Expanse series.

>110 majkia: It makes the wait for Babylon's Ashes particularly agonizing.

Someone has been urging me read the Daniel Abraham part of James S A Corey's A Shadow in Summer and the rest of the Long Price Quartet,but I am hesitant,as I am not really into fantasy.
Anyone got any thoughts on the series?

Only that I've heard very good things about it too. From my perspective I'm interested because apparently it does unusual stuff with the genre, and as a big fantasy reader that has my attention. Not sure what that would mean to you.

If you want a sampling of modern fantasy but don't want to commit to a series, I'd recommend Guy Gavriel Kay for sure (e.g. The Lions of Al-Rassan) as an author at the more literary end of the scale, or check out the latest Hugo/Nebula nominees categorized as fantasy.

>111 Euryale: Doesn't it just...

>109 dustydigger: This was my first ever Andre Norton. I recall that Shakatany from Shelfari/Leafmarks recommended Storm Over Warlock as one of Norton's free Gutenberg titles to read first and that was good advice. I enjoyed Norton's imaginative writing and definitely plan to read more of her in the future.

>112 dustydigger: I haven't read that series by Daniel Abraham, but I have read the Dagger and the Coin books. I enjoyed them.

>109 dustydigger: I loved Andre Norton as well when I was a teenager... Beastmaster was a favourite then.... it was years before I found out Andre Norton was really a woman.

>117 Lynxear: Lol! Lynxear,I always knew about Norton,but for ages I never knew that Julian May,Kage Baker,R.A.MacAvoy,or James Tiptree Jnr were women. We indeed live and learn

>99 ScoLgo: Yes, and just when you think you've skipped far enough ahead to avoid the things ...

>47 Lynxear: I recently started my first, The pride of Chanur, after I got interested when someone mentioned somewhere on LT that 'Pride' has 4 meanings that all fit in this book. I can only think of 3 so far...

Up until now, I had only read Cherryh's fantasy (the Fortress books and the Arafel books). Is it just me, or are they a lot heavier to read?

>108 ScoLgo: Cool, I read Company town recently and really liked it. Hope you do too.

>120 zjakkelien: I am reading the second of the series Chanur's Venture right now and the first third of the book has the same feeling as the first book that you are reading.

you did not say what three meanings of "Pride" that you know so... let us see

1. Pride - a family of Lions is called a "pride"

Lions however, are sort of unique in the feline world. They do socialize continuously, however most felines are solitary animals.

In general, a group of cats (house cats) is called a "clowder"... a group of tigers apparently called a "streak" or "ambush".

SO... if you think that the feline aliens (Hani) look/act like lions then yes I guess the name fits. I have yet to see a picture of a male Hani. So I don't know if they look like a Male lion. but many of the characteristics of the Hani are similar to Lions in that the females often do most of the hunting but males dominate the family.

2. Pride - a deep feeling of satisfaction, in ones work or the work of a team : she had pride in her children's teamwork.

3. Pride - an arrogance displayed in superiority often to the detriment of the person. : Her pride made it impossible to accept new ideas.

4. Pride - Something honoured within a group: Their Olympic gold medal champion was the pride of the community.

I have listed 4 ways at looking at the word "Pride" I am sure there are others. How they relate to the Chanur group and Hani in general, I am sure you can make a case for it.

>120 zjakkelien: I find Cherryh's fantasy books a heavier read then her science fiction. The easiest of her fantasies for me was The Goblin Mirror.

>122 Lynxear: Thanks! I knew all meanings of the word pride you mention, but because the last three are covered by 1 word in dutch (trots), I saw them as 1 meaning. So to me, the three meanings were:
1 - family of lions
2 - the state of being proud (your meanings 2 and 3, I hadn't thought of 4)
3 - the ship, since it's the ship's name.

But now that I think about it, your view makes more sense. I can totally think of 1, 2 and 4 working for Pyanfar Chanur, but not 3. Do you feel there was any arrogance in play?

I had never heard of clowder or streak, by the way. Interesting...

>123 seitherin: Ah, so it isn't just me! I read her fantasy when I was younger, but when I tried to re-read them later on, I couldn't quite imagine how I had managed to get through them as a teenager. I'm not sure if I would finish them nowadays; there are too many other books that I still want to read to spend my time on something that drags. Perhaps it was different when I was younger, because my source of books was the library, and that had a limited selection. In addition, I wasn't attending any online fora, so I didn't know as much about what was out there.

>122 Lynxear: >124 zjakkelien: As far as I could work out, The Pride of Chanur was originally a standalone, and Chanur's Venture sort of recapitulates its plot before slingshotting into a new one that covers the three books. I reviewed them all for SF Mistressworks and they're good stuff. I think I liked The Kif Strike Back best - certainly the kif were the most interesting of the alien races. And I agree about Cherryh's fantasy. The only one I've read an enjoyed was The Paladin. But I love her science fiction.

>125 iansales: I agree with you that "The Pride of Chanur" reads like a one of though there was a loose end with that being Tully and potential trade with humans and I think that the work she put into establishing the KIF and KNNN as bad guys and Mahendo'sat and Stsho as sort of good guys as well as the Hani would make it difficult for Cherryh to throw away the possibilities of future stories.

I am about half way through Chanur's Venture and I am just now learning something new in the story. It really starts much like the first book did with sneaking Tully onboard and chaos around that. I do like the introduction of Pynfar's husband and his adjustment to not being top dog.

I have not read her fantasy but I have read more space opera in The Merchanter's Luck which I thought was excellent and
Forty Thousand in Gehenna which I thought the third of the book about world building was brilliant but then the wheels fell off for me. The novel seemed to lose focus and I found myself wondering where this book was going...well it went to a very unsatisfactory ending for me.

>124 zjakkelien: I don't really see 2 and 3 being the same thing.

I can have pride in doing something well... there is no arrogance in that satisfaction. But pride as a form of arrogance is a quantum leap above mere satisfaction...

Does Panfar show pride in the sense of arrogance? I think so, in fact the Hani females all show it in their vanity of dress and looking good... the rings in their ears, how they carry themselves....especially shown in the leaders of female groups.

yeah, I never heard of those terms for groups of household cats and tigers.

Some cats are not social at all... the Lynx for example are solitary animals with the male and female getting together during mating season... the males leaving the female shortly afterward to look after the kittens who eventually leave the female when they are ready.

A group of Leopards are called a "leap" or "prowl" it seems... how these names develop is beyond me.

>127 Lynxear: I don't really see 2 and 3 being the same thing.
Well, no, they're not. That's what I was trying to say, that I agree with what you wrote.

I don't see the arrogance on Pyanfar, though. To me, taking care of how you dress is not arrogance. It is done to show who they are, what standing they have, not to say that they are better than others. At least, that's not what I took from it. To me, this is more pride in your meaning nr. 2.

>122 Lynxear:
>124 zjakkelien:
>125 iansales: I'd completely forgotten about The Paladin. I really liked the book when I read it way back when. I'll have to treat myself to the Kindle edition for my birthday next month. And The Faded Sun Trilogy, which was the first Cherryh I ever read.

>121 zjakkelien: About 2/3 through and am enjoying it. Reminiscent of early Walter Jon Williams, (Hardwired, Voice of the Whirlwind, etc).

>122 Lynxear: thru >129 seitherin: I have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to Cherryh but her titles that I have read to date, (Cuckoo's Egg, Downbelow Station, and The Faded Sun Trilogy), have all been great.

I've been a Cherryh fan for a long time,collecting her books as and when I can,considering the bookshops and libraries dont have many of her works. I've read 35 of her novels,all SF,havent fancied the fantasy at all.
I am already handing out hints for Xmas to my family for book tokens.I particularly have my eye on the Deep Beyond omnibus(Serpents Reach,Cuckoo's Egg) and the At the Edge of Space omnibus(Brothers of Earth,Hunters of Worlds).
I see the sequel to Hammerfall,Forge of Heaven is available on Open Library. Hammerfall is the only Cherryh in our library system,and its annoyed me for years that I couldnt read the sequel,so at last I will be able to fill the gap.
So there's five Cherryh books I will be reading next year - plus of course the latest Foreigner episode!

I finished The Dosadi Experiment this weekend and posted my review this morning.

About to reread Asimov's The Gods Themselves.

>133 ThomasWatson:. The title of that book comes from one of my favorite quotes "Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain." I believe that Asimov attributes the quote to "Anonymous," but I was corrected at some point by someone who informed me that the quote is actually from Friedrich Schiller's Die Jungfrau von Orleans. Who Knew? Not Asimov, I guess.

I'm reading The Golem and the Jinni which is apparently fantasy, but intriguing so far.

Getting my fill of monsters with The Voyage of the Sable Keech.

I just finished Adrift on the Sea of Rains by Ian Sales. Very short but quite deep in spite of the brevity. Also superbly well-written. The abrupt and twisty ending sort of pissed me off - but I really should have seen it coming as there were hints along the way. In retrospect, the more I think about it, the more I have to say, "Nicely done."

I plan to read the next installment in the Apollo Quartet soon.

Finished The Sunborn, now doing The World At Bay, because every once in a while I like to revisit the Winston juvenile series with that great Schomburg endpaper. And this may be the only book in the series that has something that appears in the illustration!

>137 ChrisRiesbeck:

that great Schomburg endpaper

Ooh. I've seen that image before but never knew what it was from. Thanks for sharing!

>136 ScoLgo: The ending is the one thing about the book that gets the most complaints - that and the lack of quotation marks :-)

>137 ChrisRiesbeck: I have started reading this really fun juvenile series this year. Better late than never,but I wish these had been around in my library back in the 60s.
So far I have read Clarke's Islands in the Sky,Evan Hunter's Find the Feathered Serpent,and Milton Lesser's The Star Seekers and Stadium Beyond the Stars,all of which were rather cute or nicely informative about spacefight etc (especially of course the Clarke!)
I have discovered a source to read 25/37 of the series - eventually - but unfortunately the Capon book isnt one of them.
Thats a great endpaper!.

>137 ChrisRiesbeck:
>140 dustydigger:

There's a nice-looking page on the Winston SF series over at the Worlds Without End site:

https://worldswithoutend.com/lists_WinstonSF.asp

>141 artturnerjr: Thats the site where I am keeping track of my Winston Classics read.WWEnd is my favourite SF resource. Finding it merely by chance way back in 2012 is a major reason why I got back into reading SF,once I saw those fabulous lists I was a gonner! lol. Beautiful layout,easy to use,and with masses of useful information and excellent reviews. Plus of course the various challenges. Havent been able to do as much reading or challenges this year because of real life issues, and have woefully neglected the challenge I run there,but I think it is a great site!

>139 iansales: Oh, I'm not complaining. The ending was so abrupt and came seemingly out of nowhere that I was a bit taken aback at first. After reflecting on Peterson's previous behaviour, I came to realize that you had actually telegraphed the potential for such a finish in advance. The hints were subtle but they were there. I just missed them. Hence, my comment of, "Well done."

I also didn't expect the ending right then because my e-reader was reporting that I was only about 75% of the way through. I was like, "Huh? Wait! What just happened?!?" And then I found the extensive appendix... ;)

I actually didn't even notice the lack of quotation marks. McCarthy did the same thing with The Road and that aspect of that book didn't bother me either, (other aspects of it did).

>143 ScoLgo: I approached writing Adrift on the Sea of Rains as "Cormac McCarthy on the Moon" :-) You'll find the story of The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself very different :-)

>143 ScoLgo: >144 iansales: I always wondered why Ivy Compton-Burnett used quotation marks, she used hardly any other punctuation. I supposed her lack of dialogue tags coupled with lack of quotation marks would have completely confused people back in the 30s. Still, I think the absence of both really keeps a reader on their toes.

I am almost at the end of Chanur's Venture.... while not an absolute dud, it has been a less than satisfying read. For the most part I have the nagging feeling I am reading a Chanur's Pride rewrite sometimes. I like the interplay with Pynfar and her husband. However I find it hard to follow the pidgin alien English at times. Time to revert back to Historical fiction again... I think I laid my hands on a good 'un... Ratcatcher

>146 Lynxear: Yes, I thought the same about Chanur's Venture. But the story does pick up in the next book.

>146 Lynxear: Ratcatcher is a gripping and exciting read. The descriptions of the terrible conditions in the London slums makes for gruesome and shocking reading at times. Good fun though. I am looking for a copy of the sequel,Resurrectionist all about Burke and Hare type activities. :0)

>147 iansales: I am glad I am not the only one thinking this way. I may look for the next book in the series then if you say the story picks up, God's rot it!... (wish their colorful language had a few more expressions) :)

>148 dustydigger: I need a griping exciting story right now :)

>147 iansales: I think Chanur's Venture suffers a bit from "middle book" syndrome. When I first read it, I reacted to it a bit the way some people did to The Force Awakens (though without the venom of so many). Since then I've read the entire series straight through, and it didn't stand out so clearly in that way.

Finished Cards of Grief by Jane Yolen. I really enjoyed the book.

It's been a while since I've logged on my sci-fi books read by month, and given the differences in nesting conversations on LT, I'll just do one message per book. Since I tend to be long-winded anyway :)

A few days after I started it, I finished Star Wars: Bloodline by Claudia Gray. I found it at a vendor's booth at DragonCon*, and it was recommended several times at a Star Wars panel at DC, so I bought it. I'm not as big into the Star Wars universe as I am into other universes, but it does have an impact on the world at large and I did enjoy Force Awakens, so it was good to see the back story.

It was well-written, enjoyable, romping but still having a serious bent. The marriage between Han and Leia is what one would expect, and the political dynamics are pretty darn real. And brutal. And the ending was completely unexpected (at least for this reader).

Speaking DragonCon, for cosplayers, my hat is off for having another female lead in Force Awakens. There were a whole lot less of the too-oft-used Slave Leias, and a ton of young women dressed as Rey. Nice change, and lots of good discussions about Luke, lightsabers, and Rey's parentage during the Con.

Another reason I haven't been posting on weekends was that the weekend after DragonCon, BBC America (and *not* the SyFy channel!) hosted the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, Original Series. In order. For 24 hours a day all weekend. I had forgotten several of the plot lines, others were old friendships renewed, and it was just wonderful to sit and knit and watch the old gang in the sequence by which they came on and revolutionized, well, the world.

And I only stopped watching them to sleep and run a few essential errands. Don't think DH even knew what a true addiction/obsession looks like until he saw me that weekend doing nothing but watching.

So after that weekend, I dug through one of my bookshelves and came out with my James Blish adaptations of Star Trek. Yep, not all 12 volumes, but many of them, *and* the old Star Trek: The New Voyages Vol. I and Vol. II. Battered but still readable.

I finished Star Trek 2 and am starting on Star Trek 3 and reading bit by bit. I hadn't noticed when I was younger, but there are some instances when Blish leaves out sections of the episode (such as "Tomorrow is Yesterday" - no mention of their going to Earth to retrieve the photographs Christopher makes), and on others he adds paragraphs that may have been original to the script or simply parts from his own ideas that gave added meaning to the story.

Still reading through Childhood's End and finding it doable. Tough, but doable. I have liked Clarke in the past with other works and I'm not quite sure what's making this one so hard for me to read. Maybe the language of the time? Ingrained sexism? The action is certainly there, the ideas for humanity's future, but it's still a bit of a slog.

So my final post for here is the book I *literally* stumbled into when I was turning a corner at the vendor's hall at DragonCon. I turned, and there was this book cover with a naked man on the front called 2113, containing stories inspired by the music of Rush. I turned from shopper to fan girl in a heartbeat and could not stop gawking and repeating that I had to have that book and that I didn't even know that it existed!!

I was over the moon, and then to discover that Kevin Anderson was there, happy to sign that book and offering me the opportunity to purchase the book he wrote with Neil Peart called Clockwork Lives. Sadly, being job-less right then as now, I had to decline that kind offer, but I did get a signature from Kevin Anderson on my copy of 2113 and began reading it later that evening. It is brilliant, full of interpretations of the songs of some of the smartest creators of rock music ever recorded. Just finished the inspiration to "Red Barchetta" two nights ago and it was a bit scary for those of us who love to drive good cars.

One of the most interesting panels I attended at DragonCon was on the influence of fantasy on heavy metal music. Quite fascinating, and it even included reference to a recording the late Sir Christopher Lee made with a band (don't know which one) in the 70's. I am not a true heavy metal/death metal fan, but I do love the way that rock bands used influences that were sometimes out of this world to craft their music.

>155 threadnsong: Christopher Lee did a lot of work with metal bands, including making a recording at the age of 90! Wikipedia has as much detail as you could want:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Lee#Music_career

A lot of the crossover between prog rock and fantasy came out of the reaction to The Lord of the Rings. There were also sf influences; perhaps the one I as a Brit am most familiar with is the collaboration between Michael Moorcock and Hawkwind (though Moorcock also recorded with his own band, The Deep Fix) (or so I understand. This isn't really my musical genre. My tastes for fantasy/music crossovers are mainly occupied with Wagner).

>156 RobertDay:

Moorcock also wrote lyrics for the US band Blue Oyster Cult.

>155 threadnsong:

Thanks for the heads-up on the Rush book; they're a great favorite of mine. I don't know if an anthology of this nature would make sense for other artists, but it's fitting for such a well-read band. My older brother (who's also a fan) will be ecstatic that there's an in-print version of "A Nice Morning Drive" (the "Red Barchetta" inspiration that you mentioned above) out there - he's been trying to get me to track down a copy of that for him for years. Guess I can cross him off my Christmas list now! :)

You got it! It's a good read, very visual, and there is a bio of the author as well as his afterword. Your brother will love it.

No kidding? I thought it was just the one band, whose name escapes me. And the mentions of Lord of the Rings during the panel were huge; it's as if, totally unwittingly, Tolkien inspired an entire genre of musicians in addition to artists and writers. I *wish* I could remember the name of the band (it was one I've never heard of) who made their entire corpus of music on LOTR.

And thank you both RobertDay and paradoxosalpha for the info on Michael Moorcock. I read him in my younger years, and had no idea he also had musical roots.

I finished the sci-fi related I Am Spock yesterday. Nimoy was a good guy; I miss him.

Then started Stanislaw Lem's Return From the Stars. I'm not sure if it's the translation, but while Lem is very descriptive of the world the main character returns to, I'm having trouble seeing it. Still, some interesting concepts coming out.

Just finished The Autobiography of James T. Kirk edited by David A. Goodman. It was great to relive many of my favorite episodes.

>160 threadnsong: Austrian black metal band Summoning sing about LotR and even sing in Elvish

No Sf this week,as I had to focus on some library books which couldnt be renewed,so I have been reading an Ellery Queen and a chinese mystery story.
I put aside Wolfe's Sword of the Lictor for a while,mostly to try to get my head around some plot revelations. I particularly like to muse about our Severian when I am washing up the dishes,a mindless task that can set me screaming with boredom,but now I am whining in shock and bewilderment as I try to wrap my head around this book,a pleasant change! lol.
I also put aside my latest Nebula winner read Elizabet Ann Scarborough's The Healer's War about a nurse working in a army hospital during the Vietnam war,who meets an old man whose amulet seems to have mystical healing powers,a rather tenous connection to fantasy for the book As I said in my profile,the war genre is one I avoid like the plague as a rule,so thats making the book difficult anyway with its graphic depictions of war wounds,screaming patients and the like. Then there is the depressing casual sex,drug taking,low morale,and the persistant raciism,even of so called allies,which is so offensive and distressing ,however realistic. And I know for a fact things are going to get really dire when the heroine ends up in the jungle and is captured by the Vietcong. Dreading it! I tend to stick with challenge reads so that I can tick them off faithfully from my eternal lists,but this is very hard going,not least because I have no empathy with the rather ditsy,clueless heroine.First person too,so I cant get a break from her somewhat vapid thoughts.I can see that it is quite a good depiction of events,but too downbeat for me. Have read 110/378 pages ,so I have a hard trek ahead!. :0(

OK,having escaped from mind cracking Urth,and horrible damp and bloody Vietnam,I have some fun reads to finish up to return to the library by 30th September
Scott Westerfeld - Leviathan ✔
H Beam Piper - Fuzzy Sapiens✔
Andre Norton - Quest Crosstime

>160 threadnsong: Sounds like the band Summoning.

Finished the wonderful We Have Always Lived in the Castle and stared The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet which, so far, is kind of meh.

I'm currently reading Revenger by Alastair Reynolds.

Just started The Raft by Fred Strydom, a South African author, this is his first novel. A dystopian sci-fi, everyone has lost their memory and are living in communes.

Yes, that sounds right - it was a band I was not familiar with, and iansales also mentioned that band a few posts back.

Thank you everyone for filling in the blanks!

Finished The World at Bay, started Red Thunder

Finished Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld,which is set in an alternate 1914,where after an ideological split back in the 19th century Europe has split into Clankers,nations who have become heavily mechanized,heavily armed,and Darwinists,especially in Britain,who have cracked the genetic code and have adapted animals and birds as beasts of burden and weapons of war,which is regarded as an abomination to the Clankers. Leviathan is a whale airship. Deryn is a girl disguised as a boy to join the military,Alek is the son ofthe Archduke of Austria -Hungary who has escaped with a handful of supporters after his family were killed as an excuse to start a war. He is being searched for across Europe to kill him. A riproaring adventure ensues in a wonderfully convincing and detailed world. The book has copious magnificent illustrations which truly enhance the story. My first tentative foray into YA steampunk was great fun.

Finished the book of Dave Langford reviews, now about to start Kim Stanley Robinson's A Short, Sharp Shock.

Finished The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and enjoyed it more or less, it was more like a tv show then a novel but good escapism.

>134 vwinsloe: Actually, Asimov gives the correct attribution toward the end of the first part of the book. (Just got there - reading time has been a little scarce of late - again!)

Recently started reading When the Green Star Calls, the second of Lin Carter's Green Star sword-and-planet books.

>175 ThomasWatson:. Hmmm, perhaps that was corrected in a later edition than I owned. Thanks.

Completed H Beam Piper's second Fuzzy story,Fuzzy Sapiens.Good fun and the Fuzzies are delightful,but the book comes across today as very paternalistic and patronising of these small golden furred creatures newly discovered to have speech and the mental level of a 10 year old.They come across as rather amusing cute pets,but still an enjoyable read,so I will search out the third book in the series soon.
Now I am reading Poul Anderson's Vault of the Ages one of the Winston juvenile classics,and Piers Anthony's Cluster,trying to finish them before the end of the month.

I haven't read anything about the Fuzzy universe, except noting that John Scalzi recently revisited/rebooted it in a new novel that seems to have been well-received. I think it would be interesting to read an older series and then a follow-up with modern sensibilities laid over it.

>178 dustydigger: Good luck with Piers Anthony. He's an author who divides opinions.

>177 vwinsloe: You know, that's quite possible. The copy I'm reading was a specially "collectable" edition - given as a gift - that was printed many years after the novel was first released.

>180 SFF1928-1973: I was away in Africa for 12 years and when I returned our little public library had only six shelves of SF/Fbooks,and one of them was totally made up of Anthony's books!. Now there isnt even one of his books on the shelves! lol.I am reading this one because it is on Morwenna's bookshelf in Jo Walton's Among Others. I also need to read A Spell for Chameleon and Chaining the Lady,but I wont be reading all those series that are apparently full of lame puns,not my sort of thing at all! :0)
Cluster is quite fun actually,I'm enjoying it.

>181 ThomasWatson:. My copy, which I sadly no longer own, was an edition that was put out by a science fiction "book of the month club." Had to be back in the '70s, I'd guess. I still see some of that club's volumes in used book stores occasionally. It was one of those deals where you could get a half a dozen books on the cheap to begin with, and then they would send you a book (their selection or you could choose from a few alternatives) automatically every month for a certain contractual period, and you couldn't cancel until the commitment period was over. I got some good books from them! I'll bet some others here from the US were members, too.

>183 vwinsloe: Oh, I was a member of the SFBC for a long time! In fact, I once owned a copy of the edition you mention, but traded it in when the fancier one came my way. Buying enough books within the contractual period was never a problem for me. lol

>183 vwinsloe: There was a UK SFBC, which was run by a major UK niche non-fiction publisher (if 'major' and 'niche' in the same sentence doesn't make it an oxymoron!). Some of their monthly selections were a bit second-rate, but others came out of the Gollancz list, so the 'book of the month' could be a bit hit-or-miss. I still have slightly more than half my SFBC selections even now, and I've acquired a few more since.

>182 dustydigger: Anthony has fallen out of favor in part because of accusations of paedophilia. This stems, I believe, from a pornographic novel he wrote called Firefly which contains sex scenes between a grown man and a five year old girl.

>182 dustydigger:, >186 justifiedsinner:

He fell out of my favor for those execrable Xanth books. But I may some day get around to some of his other early novels.

>184 ThomasWatson: Yes, I had a ton of books from them, too, and they introduced me to many authors who I might have overlooked back then. I don't remember what happened in the end--they may have closed up shop.

>185 RobertDay:. The hit or miss of the main selection was my experience as well. I wonder whether they were the same club with different books for different continents?

I am sad to say that most of my treasured books from that club were lost when I moved to South America. After that I lost my drive to collect--particularly since I spent the next few years reading about "astronaves" in pulp spanish language SF. I still keep very few books now other than the enormous TBR pile.

>188 vwinsloe: There's something out there calling itself the SFBC, but it isn't what we would recognize as such. For all practical purposes, it's gone. I still have a lot of books I purchased through the SFBC, though, and like you I found a lot of authors through them.

I read a comment somewhere that The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet was like reading Firefly fanfic. It is. It's also like reading a fanfic of Star Trek, Star Wars and every other soft-core SF TV and movie series that's ever been. There is really nothing original here.

In her bio blurb Becky Chambers says she spends a lot of time thinking about space. She might spent a bit more time thinking about science (or a least avoiding the subject altogether). Using algae for fuel in deep space where there is no sunlight might sound eco-conscious to the anti-science Whole Food crowd but just doesn't work.
And despite the twaddle-laden explanation the chances of having a bunch of aliens with so similar a biochemistry that they react to stimulants and narcotics the same way is next to zero the Star Wars cantina not withstanding. Even my cats don't react the same way and we are from the same planet.

>189 ThomasWatson: Yes, I was in SFBC until they morphed into a very different model of "pay us first and then you can get some books."

For the last few years before that happened, their newsletter actually improved quite a bit. It was more like Tor's web site with editors who read and enjoyed SF commenting on new selections, and author's describing their books.

What I liked best about SFBC book-wise were some of the club-only omnibuses they put together.

>191 ChrisRiesbeck: I have a number of those omnibus editions: the original Amber novels by Zelazny, the first two volumes of The Hugo Winners edited by Asimov, and of course, Asimov's own Foundation Trilogy. Those come immediately to mind. There are others. At the time, they were bargains!

>191 ChrisRiesbeck:, >192 ThomasWatson:

I have some of these too, picked up used, and usually for a song. They're still bargains! I recently read The Nomad of Time in such an edition, and I have one for The Book of the New Sun that is the copy I'll use for my planned re-read of those novels.

>125 iansales:
Ditto with everyone about Cherryh's SF being better than her fantasy, & in loving the Chanur series -- and agreeing that the Kif are the most interesting species (though the concept of the T'ca with their multi-brain thinking & speech is pretty neat). One of the good things about the series is the increasing understanding of the Kif, seen through Pyanfar's eyes. The presentation of them stays the same, really, but one comes to see them as different, not evil.

>190 justifiedsinner: That was probably me. I didn't think the book was all that good. It seemed more like television writing than an actual novel.

>195 iansales: TV shows seemed to be the main inspiration for the book. It was startlingly unoriginal. Also very retro, she's seems not to have read a SF novel published in the last decade or two. What I found really repulsive, though, was the forced jollity. It gave me a flashback to the time when I was ten and my mother took me to one of those British concentration camps that went by the name of Butlin's Bognor Regis.

Finished Poul Anderson's Vault of the Ages one of the Winston juvenile SF series. Well written and exciting but surprisingly violent for a junior book,with endless hand to hand combats and savage battles,not my cup of tea really. But I'm sure the teenage boys back in 1952 gulped it down.
As per usual in the 50s the book is set 500 years after the fall of civilisation,and as usual all things from the old world are taboo. But when barbarians from the north, where a new ice age is beginning, desperately attack the fertile lands of the Dalesmen near the ruins of New York,a young man decides to brave entering the ruined city to look for something to help his people against the marauders. There is a vault filled with books ,pictures and models of technology that could restore the glories of civilisation more quickly if only the fear and superstition against the past can be overcome. Very upbeat,optimistic and hopeful conclusion to the book,which is a nice change from the extremely downbeat tone of adult SF at the time! :0)
My next in this series will be Lester Del Rey's Marooned on Mars

>197 dustydigger: Seems to me a certain teenaged boy in the late '60s gulped it down, as well. ;-)

>197 dustydigger: >198 ThomasWatson: my favourite Poul Anderson book was High Crusade. I read it as a pre-teenager and reread it a decade ago and liked it again about a decade ago... though it did seem juvenile the second time around.

>198 ThomasWatson: lol! Wish they had been available to me back then,but better late than never,I am working through them now. Only 5/37 read so far,but its a start :0)

68 Watson & 52 Lynxear & others: Cherryh is definitely a wonderful scifi writer, especially with her emphasis of human-alien interactions. I read several books in the Foreigner series (about 9) and then lost patience. Became a mite repetitive. However, I am girding up for the award-winning Cyteen. She really knows how to draw a scene and make the characters come alive. She is such a great writer.

I have read some different authors this month - some are excellent.

The best author for me this month is G.S. Jennsen with the Aurora Rising trilogy. An intrepid space explorer who finds an unexplanable anomaly and only a former enemy can substantiate the findings, while the universe is about to explode into war. It is extraordinarily well-written, with great subplots.

S.H. Jucha's Silver Ships series takes you on a heck of a junket. ONce again humanity has gone out to the stars, but as a means of saving the race from a dying planet. The story starts with an asteroid miner salvaging a strange unresponsive spaceship and finds himself interacting with an AI who is protecting humans from another system. They had barely survived an alien attack. That's just the starting point. Well-written, but not with the detailed character development that Jennsen provided.

I also recommend Julie E. Czerneda (Trade Pact Series) and Ben Jeapes (The Ark).

I have just finished The Three-Body Problem which was excellent.

>203 bernsad: I wasn't impressed by The Three-Body Problem, and I'll not be bothering with the sequels. Take out the Cultural Revolution bits - and they were done better in The Fat Years - and you have a 1950s sf novel. I admit it started out well, but as soon as the aliens were introduced it went downhill.

Finished The Inverted World (4*) and started Last Call.

>205 justifiedsinner: Have you read Tim Powers before? He is one of my favorite authors, though his stuff is not science-fiction so much as weird urban fantasy, (ghosts, secret histories, ancient legends, and other weirdness abound). I'll be interested to see what you think of Last Call and whether you might read the other Fault Lines books after finishing.

>206 ScoLgo: Yes, I've read The Drawing of the Dark and Three Days to Never and like him a lot. I have the other two Fault Lines books on my TBR.

>201 triciareads55: Cyteen is an excellent novel that will keep you on your toes. I was so glad that she finally wrote a sequel - Regenesis and finished that tale.